Blogger2Ghost.NET

I personally used this project to move my blog from Blogger to Ghost. I tried using a number of existing migration tools, but none did everything I wanted and all were written in a language I don't know well enough to quickly fix their shortcomings.

It will import from Blogger to Ghost v1.0. If you want to migrate to Ghost v2.0 or v3.0, you'll need to import to a v1.0 instance and then upgrade Ghost to the latest version.

Features

• Use the blogger export feature and don't rely on the public atom/rss feeds.
• Remap blogger tags to ghost tags (incl redirects)
• Remap multiple blogger tags to a single ghost tag
• Delete redundant tags
• Auto-order tags based on priority
• Remap old urls to new ones (incl redirects)
• Convert HTML to Markdown
• Download all images from blogger (and other sources)
• Detect missing/broken images
• Detect malformed links
• Retain the old RSS feed urls
• Retain the Google+ comments
• Fixes internal links
• Converts <pre> tags to code blocks
• Generate easy to import zip file

Uses

This project relies on

• ManyConsole to provide rudimentary help information
• Newtonsoft.Json to build the mapping and export files
• ReverseMarkdown to convert HTML to Markdown

Sample conversion

1. Download blogger backup from blogger admin panel.

2. Generate all the mapping files

   • Run

     blogger2ghost mapping -i bloggerbackup.xml -o .\migration --all
     

     • Include --include-drafts to migrate draft posts as well.
     • Include --from and --to to change the urls of each post using Regex.
     • Include --force to overwrite any existing mapping file.
     • Replace --all with --tags, --urls or --authors to (re)generate individual files.
   • Run

     blogger2ghost images -i bloggerbackup.xml -o .\migration
     

     • Include --include-drafts to migrate draft posts as well.
     • Include --force to overwrite any existing mapping file.

3. Create the required users in Ghost and set their email and slug.

4. Manually edit the authors.json to map your Google+ account to your Ghost email and slug.

5. Manually edit the tags.json to map your blogger tags to ghost tags.

   • Map multiple tags by adding them to the blogger tags array.
   • If the blogger tag is different than the ghost slug also add the blogger tag to the aliases array.
   • Create parent/child tags by nesting child tags in the child_tags array.

6. Manually edit the urls.json to update the slug (ToUrl) to use on Ghost (don't change the blogger urls).

7. Manually edit the images.json to update image file names or external locations

   • If you want to rename your images, change the file name in the .\migration\images folder and update the images.json accordingly.
   • If images failed to download optionally download alternate images yourself and update the .\migration\images accordingly.

8. Optionally resize your images using your favorite image editor.

9. Upload your custom theme containing the custom-blogger.hbs template.

10. At this point you're ready to generate the import file for Ghost.

    blogger2ghost convert -i bloggerbackup.xml -o .\migration 
    

    Optionally add:

    • Include --force to overwrite any existing export files.
    • Include --template blogger to assign the custom-blogger.hbs template to each post
    • Include --zip to zip up the .\migration\ghost.json and all images in .\migration\images for import.
    • Include --markdown to convert your blogger HTML to markdown.
    • Include --include-drafts to migrate draft posts as well.
    • Include --redirect-permanent to generate 301 type redirects.

11. Upload the final ghost.json or ghost.zip to your ghost blog.

12. Upload the final redirects.json to your ghost blog.

Trying again

It took me a few attempts to get everything right. You can use the "Delete all content" option in the Ghost admin panel to start over.

Google+ Comments

To include Google+ comments from your old blog, include:

<script src="https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>
<div id="comments"></div>
<script>
    if (bloggerUrl){
		gapi.comments.render('comments', {
    		href: bloggerUrl,
    		width: '624',
    		first_party_property: 'BLOGGER',
    		view_type: 'FILTERED_POSTMOD'
		});
    }
</script>

in your custom-blogger.hbs in the comment section. The bloggerUrl variable will automatically be added in the post's code injection header section.